Faced with patent insincerity, the indulgent narrator takes off
his gloves here. Twain has tucked an expository essay into this
chapter to explain his anger and some of his views on writing.
Yet the chapter is still hilariously funny.

As the school year winds down, Mr. Dobbins prepares his
students for the ordeal of Examination Night, the closing
exercise. Dobbins is especially eager for a good performance.
He literally whips his students into shape-at least, those
students too small to fight back. Remember that the one-room
schoolhouse of Twain's day served students of all ages. The
oldest student in Twain's school, Andy Fuqua, was twenty-five.

The smaller boys hatch a plot to get revenge on Examination
Night. Except to say that the sign-painter's boy has been
enlisted in the scheme, Twain keeps you in the dark about the
plot until the very end of the chapter. Can you suggest why?

The bulk of the chapter describes Examination Night. Read the
description closely to discover Twain's criticism of a popular
literary style and of what passed for education in his day.

Your browser does not support the IFRAME tag.

The entire town seems to have assembled to see the students
perform and compete for prizes. The first "scholar" to appear is
a little boy, who recites an old favorite-David Everett's 1791
poem, "Lines Written for a School Declaration by a Little Boy
of Seven." (Twain provides only the first two lines.) Although
his delivery is unnatural (his gestures are like those of a
machine "a trifle out of order") and he is "cruelly scared," the
boy survives the experience.

Tom Sawyer does not survive his. He struggles through Patrick
Henry's 1775 speech to the Virginia Convention, is seized with
stage fright, and leaves the stage "utterly defeated."

NOTE: TOM'S FAILURE

Tom loves the limelight and will do almost anything to be the center
of attention. But those occasions when he is the focus of attention in
academic settings are excruciatingly painful. In Chapter 4, when pressed
to name Jesus' first two disciples, he is so far off base that Chapter
Twain draws "the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene."
How do you explain Tom's success at schemes that he designs and controls
and his failure at those designed by others?

Following Tom's defeat, others recite such "declaratory gems"
as Felicia D. Hemans' "Casablanca" and Lord Byron's "The
Destruction of Sennacherib." (Twain refers to these poems
respectively by their first lines, "The boy stood on the burning
deck" and "The Assyrian came down.") The night includes a
spelling bee, recitations in Latin, and reading exercises.

But the evening's highlight comes when the older girls read their
original essays, which Twain reviews with disdain. As Twain
notes at the end of the chapter, he did not create these examples
of "schoolgirl prose." He lifted them, word-for-word, from
Mary Ann Harris Gay's 1871 book, The Pastor's Story and
Other Pieces: or, Prose and Poetry.

NOTE: TWAIN'S CRITICISMS

What irks Twain about these "original 'compositions?'" First,
they're not very original. "The themes were the same that had been
illuminated upon similar occasions by... all their ancestors in the female
line clear back to the Crusades." Second, the compositions are full
of overworked melancholy. Third, they are wordy and artificially pumped
up with "fine language." Fourth, their authors re-use pet words
and phrases until they are "worn entirely out." Fifth, they
are "marred" by preachiness-"the intolerable sermon that
wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them."
In sum, the essays are unfelt and insincere.

By implication, Twain's criticism condemns the adult world that encourages
insincerity. The adult listeners whisper such compliments as "How
eloquent!" and "So true!" during the readings and applaud
enthusiastically.

Is Twain being too harsh on the authors and their parents? You can't
answer accurately until you've applied Twain's standards to the three
excerpts he includes in this chapter. You might also ask yourself how
Twain might grade some of the essays you or your classmates have written.
How free is Twain's own writing of the flaws he describes?

The chapter ends with a bigger joke-the scheme of revenge that the smaller
boys have devised. Dobbins is trying to draw a map of the U.S. on the
blackboard when a hatch door leading to the attic opens above him. The
boys lower a blindfolded cat on a string. The cat snatches Dobbins' wig,
baring his bald, gold- painted head-the work of the sign-painter's boy,
at whose house Dobbins lives.

NOTE: TWAIN'S COMIC METHOD

Take a moment to analyze this joke. Suppose Dobbins' head hadn't been
painted and the boys had pulled off the wig with a fishhook instead of
a cat. The gag would still be funny. But the extra elements-the cat, the
cat's blindfold, and the gold paint- make the joke hilarious. What does
the elaborateness of the joke add to it?